It's not the type of CPU which is the problem... IBM PCs (x86) emulate heaps of different other CPUs, such as PowerPC, 6502, Motorola 68000 etc etc.

The PS3 is not that much more powerful than the 360. In order to emulate a system, the processor, gfx, sound and all the interconnecting systems have to be emulated. This is generally done by one CPU on the emulating system. Therefore I highly doubt that it is possible.

Enough with the fanboy slams. Posts are going to start disappearing. People may actually not be informed enough to know that such a topic is nonsense, or it could be just to stir up a flame war between fanboys. That kind of thing is counter productive at best.

Its a well known fact that a system has to relatively be 10X or more powerful then said system to emulate it. My PC can't emulate PS2 worth a crap although its MUCH more powerful then a PS2 ever was.

I think getting N64/Dreamcast running on the PS3/360 is a better shot then even the PS2/XBOX... forget about those and don't waste your breath on one of the current next gen systems emulating another.

I agree with Wowchamp. Every time I see this thread I wonder why it's getting longer. I didn't know before I stated coming to this forum, but have read from browsing that a system must be 10x more powerful than the system it's emulating.

It's not the type of CPU which is the problem... IBM PCs (x86) emulate heaps of different other CPUs, such as PowerPC, 6502, Motorola 68000 etc etc.

The PS3 is not that much more powerful than the 360. In order to emulate a system, the processor, gfx, sound and all the interconnecting systems have to be emulated. This is generally done by one CPU on the emulating system. Therefore I highly doubt that it is possible.

actually the type of cpu has alot to do with the chances it will never be emulated. for you to emulate an x86 processor on a powerpc you have to emulate and basically translate the cpu intructions from 1 to another that alot takes up quite alot of resources especially if on something that is speed critical. the cell while marginally more powerful at supercomputing wont me able to emulate a general processing chip. the 2 machines are too different. this is why its basically too easy for the wii to emulate the gamecube because they both run on a similar powerpc cpu. if the xbox 360 was a powerpc it would probably be a while different story.

actually the type of cpu has alot to do with the chances it will never be emulated. for you to emulate an x86 processor on a powerpc you have to emulate and basically translate the cpu intructions from 1 to another that alot takes up quite alot of resources especially if on something that is speed critical. the cell while marginally more powerful at supercomputing wont me able to emulate a general processing chip. the 2 machines are too different. this is why its basically too easy for the wii to emulate the gamecube because they both run on a similar powerpc cpu. if the xbox 360 was a powerpc it would probably be a while different story.

The Xbox 360 has a PowerPC core in it. 3 of them however. It would take all 6 of the available SPEs and one hell of a good code to emulate the 2 additional Cores.

So, as a realist, I'm with anyone who says "Forget it". There won't be a 360-Emu on PS 3. Chances are already really small for an Xbox1 emulator on it, since it is hard to get such effective code as the on the 360-Xbox-Emulator is. (even though, it actually has an advantage over the 360 because it has an nvidia chip like the old xbox)...
But time will tell on that, however 360 is a no go on PS 3.

Well any machine can emulate any other machine regardless its cpu, memory, gpu, and etc.. It comes down to the emulator fast enough to be usable. I have written NES and SNES emulator myself. I know it's no big deal, but enough to know how emulator works.

Like WOWchamp said, the system has to be 10x more powerful to emulate other machine in software mode. It is all about the raw power of CPU. It has to emulate the opcodes of CPU, GPU, how the data flow between them, how do they fetch data from the memory and other stuffs. Plus you need to have enough memory and/or hard drive space to allocation space for the main memory, sound buffer, and vram.

Let's said Xbox has P3 733Mhz CPU, NVIDIA graphics processor and 64 MB of RAM. You need a roughly 7Ghz CPU and around 512Mb Ram just to emulate those. Even the multi-core CPU only can help very little.

So Xbox or Xbox 360 emulator are possible, but totally unusable. You might looking at max of 1 frame per every 2 to 3 seconds.

I must have misread that the 360 has 3x 3.2 GHz processors while PS3 has 7x 3.2 GHz processors.

Is that not the case for retail models?

Yes, you misread big time. The Xbox 360 has a single processor with three cores that are each clocked at 3.2 GHz. The PlayStation 3 has a single 3.2 GHz Cell processor with a single PPE and eight SPE's, six accessible, one dedicated to OS processing and security and one disabled.

So, the Xbox 360's processor has three cores while the PlayStation 3's has one big "manager" core and eight smaller "worker" cores.

I believe it will be possible to get ps3 to emulate a xbox 360. It is gonna take some time but once people start to figure out how to program efficiently for the cell processor a xbox 360 emulator should be out in no time. many critics underestimate the true power of the cell processor. The way the cell processor is structured gives the ps3 unlimited processing power if the programs are written correctly. An xbox 360 emulator should be coming, but like i said give it a couple of years.

I must say you guys are really and completely insane and not too knowledgable to say that the X360 emulator is practical. I perfer the system to go down, very down, but I must admit the system is far too powerful for "practical" emulation. Who ever dreams of this and succeed's (which some brilliant idiot might) will be plagued by 18.954fps during menu's and a nearly undetectable 0.031fps gameplay.

The emulator can be made, but at no purpose but to insult Sony through the incompentant other's who don't understand that "when I emulated X360's Gears of War, my PS3 went @ like 1/8 the speed of the game, and then overheated" doesn't directly mean jack to the processing power of the PS3.

Please forget about this until the Cell B.E. Revision 4 or 5 comes out, and even then it'll be your PC, not your PS3.